Peak oil is already upon us. It is destroying our banking system, that is, our system for marshalling capital, and that is about to put us out of business-as-usual. So, we have to carry on with business-not-so-usual. This could mean anything from your children finding careers in farming (rather than show biz or plastic surgery) to reorganizing households differently to traveling from New York to Boston by boat.

The suburban cycle which began a hundred years ago is nearly over. We are in for a period of contraction and economic hardship.

We are in for a fiesta of default, repossession, and distress selling of suburban property, much of which will lose its presumed usefulness and monetary value in an energy-scarce economy.

Because I believe a lot of people share my feelings about the tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work. A land full of places that are not worth caring about will soon be a nation and a way of life that is not worth defending.

I believe most of suburbia is unreformable and will not be fixed.

Anyone who studies the energy predicament understands its connection with the operations of capital - and by this I do not mean capitalism as an ideology, I mean the behavior of acquired wealth and its deployment for productive purpose. (A lot of educated idiots don't understand this, and we waste a lot of time blathering about capitalism.)

Americans are suffering so much from being in unrewarding environments that it has made us very cynical. I think that American suburbia has become a powerful generator of anxiety and depression.